Pregnancy Loss, Essay Example

Although feminist literature often encourages poor women to abort their children, abortion is often a poor solution. It can leave women poor, guilt-wracked, struggling, isolated, reliant on alcohol and illicit drugs and sometimes more likely to kill themselves. While one can sympathize with the feminist’s desire to improve the lots of downtrodden women, evidence suggests that abortion is more harmful than helpful to young women’s short and long-term well-being. Those who truly wish to better the lots of young, pregnant women would do better to promote social solutions and to provide emotional support for these women than to encourage them to abort children they may wish to keep.

Consider the case of Christina Dunigan, a young, freshly graduated woman who was poor and starving. She was upset when she discovered she was pregnant and he agonized over making the decision to either feed herself and her unborn baby or starve herself to feed her nine-month-old daughter.  She was consumed by guilt because pro-feminist literature told her that her that if she did not eat regularly and well, her baby would be born underweight and developmentally disabled. Because of this, Dunigan felt that it was her duty to abort her child, but she could not bring herself to do it (Dunigan, 1999).

Part of the problem was the Dunigan Family’s isolation. When Christina’s husband had been stationed at Fort Ord, he had not had much time to find an apartment. Therefore, the Dunigans had ended up in a small apartment, without a refrigerator. It was far from her husband’s work and distant from supermarkets. It was as if the Dunigans lived on a desert isle. Dunigan says that she was “brainwashed” by pro-choice propaganda, into thinking her only two choices were to abort her baby or starve. She had to hate herself, either way. If she killed her own baby, she was a murderess, if she let her daughter starve, she was the same. She became more anguished as she realized that in four months, she had not gained any weight, and she felt that she had condemned her baby to a life of disability (Dunigan, 1999).

Christina was at the end of her rope, when a Roman Catholic buddy of her husband’s entered her life. Eddie looked past the propaganda and told the Dunigans that their problem was not their baby, but their apartment. He encouraged them to move closer to the base. Soon, the Dunigans were living within walking distance from the supermarket. They had a refrigerator and her husband could carpool to work to save money or leave her Christina free to shop. Suddenly, the anguishing decision between feeding her child and eating herself was gone. The Dunigans even had enough, sometimes, to have people over occasionally. Christina’s baby was born healthy and heavy. Although Christina had wrestled with the idea that because he was disabled, she would never love her son, she loved him instantly. He had no disability. Her son, she says, has become the apple of her eye (Dunigan, 1999).

If Dunigan had listened to the propaganda, she would have aborted her son. She would not have changed her location, but, rather, would have continued to starve herself in order to feed her small daughter. She would have remained isolated and would not have been able to have the social opportunities she had in her new apartment. She would not have been able to afford to have people over. In addition to this, she would have had to have lived with the guilt and despair caused by abortion. She might even have chosen to take her own life.

According to Finnish Researchers Mika Gissler, Elina Hemminki and Jouko Lonnqvist, abortion increases a woman’s risk of suicide. Indeed, they say, “the increased risk of suicide after an induced abortion indicates either common risk factors for both or harmful effects of induced abortion on mental health.” The researchers studied 73 cases of suicides related to pregnancy. Suicide after the baby’s birth accounted for 5.9% of these. Suicides after unintentional miscarriage was 18.1% and suicides after induced abortions accounted for a tragic 34.7% of cases (Gissler, Hemminiki, & Lonnqvist, 1996). These statistics indicate that abortion is devastating to many mothers and that it can bombard them with so much sadness and guilt that they feel unable to go on living.

Gissler et al are not alone.  In 2008, Kathleen Dingle and Rosa Alati found that women who experienced a loss of pregnancy, whether through abortion or through miscarriage were three times more likely than those who did not to have “a range of substance abuse disorders and affective disorders in young women.” Abortion, in particular, according to Dingle and Alati, increased year-long depression and substance abuse for young women. Women who have abortions, according to Dingle and Alati, are twice as likely to have an alcohol disorder as those who have not. One of the most heartbreaking findings of the Dingle and Alati study was that young women often turned to illicit drugs and alcohol to deaden their emotions after experiencing the pain of abortion or miscarriage (Dingle & Alati, 2008).

Furthermore, French researchers Daniel Rees and Joseph Sabia concluded that women who had abortions were twice as likely to develop major depression as other women who had been pregnant. Even when the researchers adjusted their experiments for factors such as ethnicity, income, age, number of children or even prior problems with depression, their results showed that abortion increased this risk (Rees & Sabia, 2007).

Although feminists often tout abortion as liberating, studies such as Dingle and Alati’s show that it can, in fact, be deadening. Meanwhile, stories like Christina Dunigan’s show that actually bringing a child to term can be both healthy and rewarding. Dunigan suggests that the best way to help women who wind up in situations similar to hers is to help them solve their social and logistical problems, rather than encouraging them to give up their children.

Works Cited

Dingle, K., & Alati, R. (2008). Pregnancy loss and psychiatric disorders in young women: an Australian birth cohort study. The British Journal of Psychiatry , 455-460.

Dunigan, C. (1999, June 16). Choosing not to abort: the fallacy of “poor women need abortions” . Retrieved September 02, 2010, from Rightgrll!: http://www.rightgrrl.com/99grrls/March/Christina_D/noabort.html

Gissler, M., Hemminiki, E., & Lonnqvist, J. (1996). Suicides after pregnancy in Finland, 1987–94: register linkage study. British Medical Journal , 313 (1431).

Rees, D. I., & Sabia, J. (2007). The relationship between abortion and depression: new evidence from the fragile families and child wellbeing study. Medical Science Monitor , 13 (10), CR430-CR436.